The digital revolution is allowing us to share cars, bikes, and scooters and use them only when we need them. ![]() Instead, Amazon and Alphabet operate platforms which provide access to things. ![]() Of course, just as Amazon doesn’t make (many) products, YouTube doesn’t own videos or music, Google Search doesn’t own websites, and Uber and Jump don’t own cars, bikes, and scooters. Customers access Uber cars and Jump bikes and scooters using - you guessed it - Google’s maps and navigation services. Uber, UberEats, and Jump provide more than 14 million car rides daily, more than $10 billion in food deliveries in 2019, and operate bike shares in 32 cities respectively. The term mobility eases itself into sentences (and minds), that denotes “access to” rather than “ownership of.”Īlphabet, the owner of the world’s largest internet searching service (Google), video and audio streaming service (YouTube), and popular navigation service (Waze), also has a 5.2% stake in Uber, UberEats, and Jump. Now, MaaS and mobility are by no means new ideas or terms, but, as the digital revolution matures and more people use the technology, the public are beginning to use the word because it reflects how they are moving around. Did you catch it? There it was, the reason why people are saying mobility. In 2019, many of the world’s most profitable companies don't sell things, they provide access to them.Įnter mobility-as-a-service or MaaS the shift from personal ownership of vehicles to the use of “mobility solutions” as services. Economists and business analysts will tell you that value creation is, and already has, shifted from vertically-integrated value chains to laterally-scaled digital platform models where subscription and access models rule the roost. To understand the whys and wherefores of this shift in language we have to understand our changing economy. In other words: transportation is something you do and mobility is something you have. Transportation (“across-carry” in Latin) describes the act of moving something or someone, whereas mobility (“capable of movement”) describes the ability of a person to move or be moved. The important difference here is the word ability. Mobility is the ability to freely move or be moved. Transportation is the act of moving goods or people. ![]() Why is this happening? What’s the difference between them? And why should we give a hoot about this change? Recently, however, the word transportation is being replaced with mobility. In the US, people are likely to use the word transportation to describe people and goods moving around and mobility to describe electric scooters for the elderly or with regard to social aspiration. Depending on your age, where you live, and in what industry you work, mobility may draw to mind something your grandfather rides around on, a socio-economic opportunity, or a ride to be accessed through your smartphone. You may have noticed a shift in the language used to describe the movement of people.
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